What is Membrane Technology

Membrane technologies play a very important role in water and wastewater treatments. These membrane processes provide key advantages over the conventional processes, such as lower energy requirement, lower footprint, easier to operate, and more effective contaminants removal. This chapter introduces different membrane processes: (1) pressure-driven membrane processes which are the most widely used in water and wastewater treatments, and (2) several advanced membrane processes. These processes perform physical or physicochemical separations. Most of the separations occur between liquid-liquid phases, but liquid-gas and gas-gas separation phases are also performed in the latest membrane development. The contemporary membrane bioreactor is the heart of membrane technologies that are used in various applications. However, fouling is a common phenomenon that reduces the efficiency of the membrane operation. Thus, the concept of critical flux and introduction of some control and preventive mechanism could prevent or reduce the fouling in membrane bioreactors.